important access of young people to the public space, in the South restricted formal freedoms and residual public space. In the Northern countries, the democratic society is confronted with the phenomenon of the abandonment of the representative system and the re-articulation between civil society and political society. Young people are particularly sensitive to this. It is the very meaning of the White Paper on governance in the European Union which starts with the acknowledgement of the crisis in political participation in its traditional forms, the crisis of the representative system and the steep rise in the demand for participative democracy. In the Southern Mediterranean region, the civil society is increasingly referred to, as shown by the recent Arab Spring. As underlined by Anna Bozzo and Pierre-Jean Luizard, the expression “civil society” now covers, in the Islamic countries of Africa and Asia, “all the players more or less included in a modern type of associative world” but also “a reality made of local initiatives or in the quarters, ranging from charity work to business, through local committees, around or in the absence of charismatic personalities, in traditional places (mosques), or in new spaces for socializing in modern urban life” and they remind us that “this associative phenomenon coincides with the emergence of the individual in a process of modernisation or differentiation of society43”.
There is however a danger, that of basing our copying our western models on the reality of the Southern countries; it is interesting for example to refer to a work like that of Sarah Ben Nefissa on Egypt44, and in particular on the development of the Gam’iyya shar’iyya, a religious association. She underlines, as it is mentioned by Elisabeth Longuenesse in her report on the work, the particular terms and conditions of emergence « of a new representation of the place of the individual, as an “autonomous and responsible subjet”, through the valorisation of the “virtuous act” (al’-amal al-sâlih), which makes the “citizen virtuous”, virtue being declined in all the activities and all the fields of social life, including work, trade, consumption and of course the family. This citizen language, which merges with a moral language, is expressed in the practice of solidarity and mutual aid, which is bound to appeal to the population, and of which the most outstanding characteristic, notes the author, is the absence of any distinction between private space and public space, typical on the contrary of Western modernity45”. The Arab Spring, a revolution 2.0 We will stop here for a moment on an aspect of the Arab social society, an aspect that is the object of a great deal of disussion linked with the development of the internet considered as one of these “new spaces for socializing in modern urban life” referred to by Bozzo and Luizard
18 43. BOZZO A., LUIZARD P.-J., op. cit., p. 17. - 44. BEN NEFISSA S., Pouvoirs et associations dans le monde arabe, CNRS éditions, Paris, 2002. - 45. LONGUENESSE É., « Ben Nefissa, Sarah, Pouvoirs et associations dans le monde arabe, CNRS éditions, 2002 », Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, June 2004, nos 103-104 (on line).